Posts Tagged ‘reset gnome keyring’

Reset gnome forgotten keyring password – Fix annoying reoccuring keyring password prompt

Wednesday, September 26th, 2018


If you're on Debian Linux and have a user account and you changed the password you might be unpleasantly surprised by a constantly occuring prompt to reinput the keyring stored old password.
You might be wondering how to reset the gnome keyring password to stop that annoying pop-up prompt from bittering your days.
The simplest fix is to delete all stored passwords and reset the keyring stored values. That's in case if you don't have other important passwords saved.

This is done by simply creating a backup of the old keyring just in case if you have something important stored you can do that with:


cd ~/.local/share/keyrings/
cp login.keyring login.keyring.backup


Then delete the keyring store file:


rm  -f ~/.local/share/keyrings/login.keyring


Under some GNU / Linux distrubutions such as Linux Mint deleting the keyring file will not work on such an alternative method is to use seahorse (a frontend program to GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard), that is doing key management  for GNOME desktop users.


hipo@jericho:~$ seahorse



For older Linux distributions like Ubuntu 12.10 e.g. in GNOME 2, the correct path to keyring file is ~/.gnome2/keyrings/

rm -f ~/.gnome2/keyrings/*